Ask most education funders where their money goes, and the answer is broadly consistent: programmes, research, teacher training, system strengthening, technology. Ask where climate philanthropy has directed its resources over the past two decades, and you get a different answer: all of those things, yes, but also campaigns, litigation, communications infrastructure, political mobilisation, and the sustained cultivation of public will. That strategic difference explains, more than anything else, why climate has become a defining political issue of our time while education, despite near-universal consensus on its importance, struggles to command comparable ambition or investment.
Programmes are necessary. They are not sufficient.
What climate philanthropy built
The climate movement's progress was not the result of better evidence alone. The scientific case for urgent action was well established long before governments began to act on it. What changed was the political cost of inaction, and that change was in large part funded. The European Climate Foundation spent years building national advocacy organisations across Europe that could translate global climate science into domestic political pressure. Bloomberg Philanthropies' Beyond Coal and Beyond Carbon campaigns targeted coal-fired power directly, with the resources and staying power to run them as long-term political operations. ClientEarth built a litigation practice that created legal accountability where voluntary commitments had not. Organisations like 350.org and the Sunrise Movement built youth constituencies that made the political salience of climate impossible to ignore.
None of this happened organically. It was deliberately funded, often by philanthropists who accepted that the returns would be slow, the path non-linear, and the work resistant to clean reporting cycles. They funded it anyway. One instructive example is the Meliore Foundation, a philanthropically-funded communications organisation constituted in Belgium, which runs the Global Strategic Communications Council: a network of climate communications professionals operating across more than twenty countries, working at national level to shift media debate and public understanding. There is no education equivalent. The case for building one, with the same geographic reach and the same strategic intent, is hard to argue with.
Education philanthropy has not made that bet
Education receives significant philanthropic investment globally, but the overwhelming majority flows towards delivery. The infrastructure of advocacy, communications, and political mobilisation is thin. There is no education equivalent of the European Climate Foundation, no sustained campaign organisation whose primary purpose is to shift public understanding of what quality education requires and to hold governments accountable for delivering it.
When education philanthropy has invested in campaigns, it has worked. During my time leading advocacy and communications at the LEGO Foundation, as part of a broader effort to fund a global play movement, we supported Kina Rwanda, a national campaign that used media, music, and community mobilisation to shift public attitudes towards children's learning and development, reaching roughly 40% of the Rwandan population. We also launched and co-led the campaign for a UN-recognised International Day of Play, which succeeded. These demonstrate that when philanthropy funds the argument as well as the programme, it wins. The problem is that examples like these remain the exception, funded against the grain rather than as a strategic norm.
Education philanthropy has historically been uncomfortable with advocacy, partly for reasons of institutional caution, partly because programmes are easier to measure, and partly because the returns on advocacy investment are diffuse and delayed in ways that sit badly with short grant cycles. A field that has built an impressive evidence base has ended up with a remarkably limited political footprint.
In a year when both the Global Partnership for Education and Education Cannot Wait are running replenishment campaigns against a backdrop of sharply contracting aid budgets and rising defence spending across donor governments, that footprint needs to grow. Civil society is leading this advocacy, and doing so in difficult conditions. What is missing is the philanthropic investment, particularly at national level, that would give those efforts the infrastructure, reach, and staying power to shift political outcomes rather than simply register dissent.
The case for a different approach
Climate philanthropy did not abandon science or programmes. It recognised that programmes without political will are islands, and investing in public understanding, organised constituencies, and sustained communications capacity is how you build that will.
Education needs funders willing to back organisations whose primary output is not a programme delivered but a political conversation shifted. It needs investment in national-level advocacy infrastructure that can make education a genuine electoral priority rather than a line in a manifesto. It needs campaigns that can connect the reality of underfunded classrooms to the voters and parents who might demand something better, and philanthropists prepared to fund litigation where governments have made commitments they are not keeping.
It also needs investment in movement building, particularly among parents and caregivers. Climate built its constituency deliberately, funding youth movements, community organisers, and the communications infrastructure that connected individual concern to collective action. Education has a natural constituency that is far larger: every parent, every caregiver, every family with a child in a classroom. That constituency is almost entirely unmobilised as a political force, and funding the organisations and campaigns that can turn widespread concern about children's futures into organised demand for better education systems is well within philanthropy's reach.
Private funders are well placed to do this precisely because official donors largely cannot. Governments do not run campaigns against themselves. Multilateral institutions operate by consensus in ways that constrain their freedom to advocate. Philanthropy has the independence, the risk tolerance, and the time horizon that this kind of work requires.
When public budgets contract, the arguments for education spending have to be louder and better organised, not quieter. Philanthropy cannot compensate for cuts to official development assistance through grants alone. But it can help build the political conditions in which those cuts become harder to make and easier to reverse. Climate funders grasped that the energy transition would not happen through demonstration projects alone. Education funders need to reach the same conclusion.